The morning before I had the vision of Charlie dying, he came to my kitchen door, peering over the half-curtain (I always loved to see the sky day or night) and I was in the hallway putting laundry into the laundry hamper. He told me he had just walked from his friend John Gossage’s house on Route 32. I knew that was at least fifteen miles. He told me he had been “walking at night eighteen inches inside the white line waiting to get hit by a car because [he] was depressed”. I told him I wanted him to “go see a counselor because I didn’t want to go to [his] funeral anytime soon”, as I straightened up the house while we were talking.
Then he told me that he had found a baby lamb while he was walking here during the night, and carried it as far as he could because he wanted to give it to me, but it became too heavy to carry all the way home, so he carried it until he came to someone’s fenced yard and put it in there so it wouldn’t get hit by a car.
But Charlie made himself the sacrificial lamb.
Charles Burgess Rohrer, July 17, 1964 – June 15, 1985
